This much we know about the Wyoming Senate race: Liz Cheney will be accused of being a carpetbagger. Probably often.

“A challenge for Ms. Cheney will be countering charges that she isn’t really from Wyoming, given the many years living elsewhere before re-establishing residency last year,” said University of Wyoming political scientist Jim King.
Cheney purchased a home in Jackson Hole in 2012. Before that, she lived in northern Virginia, where she graduated from high school. Cheney went to college in Colorado and law school in Illinois.

The Wyoming media and political world has taken notice. One paper offered a harsh assessment of the prospect of Cheney’s candidacy before she announced her campaign.

“Hey, Liz Cheney: If you want to run for U.S. Senate, try it from Virginia or some other state,” the Gillette News Record wrote in an editorial published Sunday. “We already have a U.S. senator — one who has spent his life in Wyoming, one who took on the unenviable job of leading Gillette through the boom in the ’70s and ’80s.”

And Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R) told reporters this on Tuesday: “It is a unique strategy to live your entire life elsewhere and then come to a state a year before you’re going to announce you’re going to run for that state’s highest office.”

What we don’t know is whether or not it will sink her bid to unseat Sen. Mike Enzi in the Republican primary, or fade into the background. But it’s already become a big part of her narrative, and one that she will have to overcome to win.

Ouch.

Cheney is not going to leave questions about her allegiance to Wyoming floating in the wind. In her Tuesday announcement video, she noted that her family has deep roots in the state, first settling there in 1852 “in search of religious freedom.” She also sought to underscore that she is in touch with the state’s issues. And remember that her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, represented Wyoming in the House for a decade.

“My sense is, as far the carpetbagger charge, is it’s from people who don’t want to talk about substance, don’t want to talk about the issues,” Cheney told the Associated Press.

The carpetbagger label doesn’t necessarily have to be a deadly political blow. Hillary Clinton’s successful 2000 New York Senate campaign is proof of this. So is Dan Coats’s 2010 Indiana Senate bid. Going back further, Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 Senate campaign success is another example.
What makes Cheney’s challenge different, though, is that Wyoming is a small state with a unique culture where retail politics matter and face time is worth its weight in gold.

What’s more, Enzi’s record wasn’t exactly crying out for a primary challenge. He’s received generally high marks from conservative groups. Even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) likes the guy. So the argument that Cheney uprooted herself and stepped up to challenge an incumbent who was asking for it isn’t likely to go very far.

The key for Cheney will be to steer the conversation away from the question of whether she is an opportunist and scrutiny about where she has spent most of her life. If she can do that, she’ll have a decent chance. She is expected to raise a lot of money, after all.

But if she allows the carpetbagger question to linger in the campaign, it will be hard to hang in. Just ask Richard Lugar, whose bungled responses over several months to questions about his residency made it easy for his opponent to paint him as out of touch and ultimately defeat him last year.

The bottom line is that unless Cheney can find clear ways to cast the spotlight on Enzi’s record (a generational contrast seems to be what she is chiefly going for at this point, and that’s far from a surefire critique of Enzi), Cheney can expect her own past to come under just as much scrutiny.

Fortress America? I didn't see a case made for that a la 19th century hermit Japan. That's a strawman. This is a tactic the left uses, misstating the other side's position. Exactly way that the GZ case and trial is currently being misstated. Reagan was in the foreign policy "Realist Camp" and the NeoCons hated him for that when he pulled out of Beirut.

And if you really want to know who really stemmed the tide of the Cold War, it was a Soviet spy turned double-agent, feeding info to Britain first. Soviet double-agent Oleg Gordievsky revealed to the British, which got back to Reagan about how much the Russians thought the United States were going to start a first nuclear strike on them. This fear existed even before Reagan got in power. They were more afraid of us. This surprised both Thatcher and Reagan so much, that they felt they backed off because they felt they could open a dialogue with the Russians.

Most of the people you would consider the leading neocons of today cut their teeth in the Reagan administration where they shared his foreign policy views. It's Ron Paul who rejected Reagan because of disagreements both foreign and domestic.

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“The American people are tired of liars and people who pretend to be something they’re not.” - Hillary Clinton

No, Wyomians are comfortable with gays ever since Brokeback Mountain and Liz's sister, Mary, came out. Liz's parents, the most esteemed Dick and Lynne Cheney, showed Wyomians and the rest of the country how to love our gay brothers and sisters and sons and daughters by publicly embracing Mary, her lifestyle, her long term partner, and their two children.

But Wyomians do love great Americans who don't apologize for our country's role as a beacon of light in this dark world and who can be trusted to lead from in front in order to keep it that way. So Liz, like her father, has that going for her.

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“The American people are tired of liars and people who pretend to be something they’re not.” - Hillary Clinton

No, Wyomians are comfortable with gays ever since Brokeback Mountain and Liz's sister, Mary, came out. Liz's parents, the most esteemed Dick and Lynne Cheney, showed Wyomians and the rest of the country how to love our gay brothers and sisters and sons and daughters by publicly embracing Mary, her lifestyle, her long term partner, and their two children.

But Wyomians do love great Americans who don't apologize for our country's role as a beacon of light in this dark world and who can be trusted to lead from in front in order to keep it that way. So Liz, like her father, has that going for her.